On 10/26/2012 04:10 PM, Andy Goldstein wrote:
Could you please elaborate on what sort of person is a
"non-technical cloud user?" What sort of VMs do you envision them spinning up?
Is the thinking that someone else (a "technical" user or an admin) will
precreate images that provide services for which the end-user does not need to use SSH or
have Linux skills? If so, I'm guessing this would be something like an image that,
when started, automatically launches something like Wordpress (or whatever app/site has a
good OOTB experience and doesn't require SSH). If not, then I'm not sure there
really is a non-technical cloud user.
The example that always comes to my mind is an artist at some animation
studio, working on a blockbusting movie.
They spend all day, being all artistic, in 3Ds Max, Maya, or (better
yet) Blender, and get to the point where they need to render 5 seconds
of cinema-quality animation.
So, they fire up Winged Monkey, a couple of clicks in the gorgeous UI,
and they've launched a mini render farm, which probably comes with its
own UI.
Another example would by a financial analyst who wants to run Monte
Carlo simulations, just to check whether her speculations might tip the
global economy into crisis, like last time.
Same thing - fire up winged monkey, a couple of clicks, and they've got
a compute cluster.
In both cases, the user isn't technically clueless, but they're not
focussed on "the cloud" and aren't required to think too much in order
to get the job done.
For these scenarios to work, you someone else has to have come along
earlier and created the images, and the application blueprints etc. That
work isn't in the scope of Winged Monkey itself. Rather, Winged Monkey
is a consumer of the capabilities of the capabilities that the
underlying provider presents.
Winged Monkey will work really well, I think, as a consumer of
Conductor's front-end APIs.